Plumbing Problems

After spending approximately 44 hours without a kitchen sink this week, I think I now understand JUST what the plumber meant when he said not to overload the garbage disposal. And I now know that I'd never survive a kitchen renovation.

After cleaning out the freezer on Wednesday, I slowly dumped 4 pint-sized containers of 2-year-old marinara (from the Summer of Excess Tomatoes) down the disposal. I thought I ran enough water with it, but it was apparently too much for our pipes to handle. This was Wednesday night, in the middle of making dinner, with a dishwasher full and ready to run, and dinner dishes to be done. 

I tried everything that Google said to try. We plunged, we did baking soda and vinegar. I went to Home Depot and bought an auger/snake and snaked the line twice, but the clog still remained. I could have tried to open the clean-out in the basement and snake it from there, but that gave me visions of flooding our laundry room with ALL of the contents of our plumbing pipes, so I decided to call in a professional. And Kevin did the dishes in the bath tub, while I rinsed them in the tiny bathroom sink.

I called our usual plumber, but his number had been disconnected/changed since I last called him a few months ago. I called his office and his voicemail box was full. Hmmm. I asked Tonya for recommendations and asked Kevin to ask around at work, and I was given four options. I called one and also reached a disconnected number, and I started to wonder what was up. The two that Tonya recommended both answered and both said how busy they've been with freezing pipes and such this week, so I'm wondering if that's why numbers were changed. Anyway, I spoke to one on Thursday and one on Friday morning, and they both said they were busy but would work me in. Just as we were leaving the zoo on Friday, I got a call that one of them could come right away, so home we went.

The plumber said that there was a lot of food built up in the pipes, so the marinara must have been the perfect consistency to block it completely. I knew he had cleared the clog, but he and his son were still working away on something, so I peeked in and asked what was up. They were trying to improve our kitchen sink's water pressure, which made me laugh because our usual plumber was also trying to fix it last time. The pressure's been bad since we bought the house and we just live with it, but apparently it bugs those in the plumbing world. He also wasn't happy with how our disposal kicks water up into the other sink when it runs, so he fixed that, too! He only charged me the price he quoted over the phone, so I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

And I've learned my lesson. 'The garbage disposal is not a trash can.' Got it. :)